People often send me personal messages asking “Hi! Can I show you my artwork?” or “Hello! Can I ask a question?”
Can I ask you a question?
I’ll definitely answer your questions. The only thing is, please don’t ask them in personal messages but rather in comments on the site. You can do it on the page of a lesson, or, if there is no suitable lesson, on the page with the list of the lessons. If you want to be anonymous, you can ask under an imaginary nickname.
This way the answers will be useful for other readers. I’ll be able to answer the same question only once. Also, some people are too timid to ask, and this way they will be able to read the answer.
Can I show my artwork to you?
At some point it starts to take up a lot of my time.
I started to create video lessons. It would be good to show some examples alongside the oral explanations. Not just some professional artwork, but also amateur, beginners’ artwork. It’s important in order to show why a perfect result is perfect, and what the difference is with the average.
I have had a lot of students, but I didn’t collect photos of all their work. That’s why I need to draw examples of mistakes myself. But the problem is that I deliberately draw them, so they appear to be exaggerated. Examples of occasional mistakes are much more interesting for an analysis. More importantly, they are real, not designed by me, so any beginner artist can face them in real life.
So if you want me to comment on your artwork, I’ll ask you to allow me to help not only you, but also to help other people. That’s why I’ll ask you to give your permission to use your artwork in my lessons.
It can be also used in a post where I’ll write my comments on artwork if I think that it would be interesting to other people. The goal, surely, is not to make fun of the artworks (I don’t do that), but to give other people an opportunity to learn from this material.
If you want to show me your artwork, please send it to me at contact@daniil-belov.com. If you want, I’ll hide your name. Just write in the message if you want me to reveal it or not. If you forget to mention that, I’ll consider this as permission to choose by myself. By the way, this decision is simply a matter of choice: some people like to be anonymous, some like to be mentioned. Choose what you prefer.
The points I’ll bring up when using your artwork as an example can be a bit different from those I’ll give in the personal answer, because different stages of education require different comments. If a person just took up a pencil for the first time, he doesn’t need to hear all his mistakes from the start as he will be overwhelmed, while a professional artist needs a much stricter approach.